Trump Bans Anthropic, Pentagon in disarray over AI and The Datacenter Frenzy Catching up on some of the AI news. Rise of Cursor plugins for non-engineers. Block's 40% layoffs. Anthropic's two red lines. Michael Spencer Mar 02, 2026 ∙ Paid 79 1 Share Anthropic’s killer-robot dispute is alarming . Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios me on Twitter and LinkedIn , I don’t have time to reply to all Substack direct message right now. Good Morning, This week Anthropic took the top spot on Apple iOS download leaderboards with its Claude App as consumers are rewarding it for standing up to the Department of Defense . It’s a hot-button topic for how AI is likely to become in charge of military autonomous drone swarms in the not-so-distant future. The idea that humans will always be “in the loop” is quickly fading. National defense ethics is giving way to new engineering reinforcement learning optimizations. Was this Newsletter forwarded to you, join the list. Subscribe Continue reading this post for free, courtesy of Michael Spencer. Claim my free post Or purchase a paid subscription. Previous

Podcast LWiAI Podcast #235 - Sonnet 4.6, Deep-thinking tokens, Anthropic vs Pentagon 15 2 1× 0:00 Current time: 0:00 / Total time: -1:41:48 -1:41:48 Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. LWiAI Podcast #235 - Sonnet 4.6, Deep-thinking tokens, Anthropic vs Pentagon Anthropic releases Sonnet 4.6, Google Rolls Out Gemini 3.1 Pro, Anthropic CEO Amodei says Pentagon’s threats ‘do not change our position’ on AI Last Week in AI Mar 05, 2026 15 2 Share Transcript Our 235th episode with a summary and discussion of last week’s big AI news! Recorded on 02/27/2026. Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris Note from Andrey: my startup Astrocade is hiring for engineers, marketing, product, growth, and more! If you’re in the bay area, would like to join a small but growing startup, and think building a youtube-of-games sounds exciting, feel free to email me at andrey@astroblox.ai Check out Astrocade! Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at andreyvkurenkov@gmail.com and/or hello@gladstone.ai In this episode: Model and tool updates highlight Anthropic’s Sonnet 4.6 (1M context; strong ARC-AGI-2 results), Google’s Gemini 3.1 Pro (major ARC-AGI-2 jump and multimodal demos), xAI’s Grok 4.2 beta (multi-agent debate), plus Anthropic’s Claude Code “Remote Control” and Perplexity’s multi-agent “Computer” coordinator. Compute and business moves include Meta’s reported up-to-$100B AMD chip deal with warrant/equity incentives, MatX raising $500M to build specialized transformer chips shipping in 2027, World Labs raising $1B for world-model/3D environment tech, and a new startup raising $100M to simulate/predict human behavior. Infrastructure and geopolitics cover Stargate data-center delays amid OpenAI/Oracle/SoftBank control disputes and cash concerns, and China’s plan to scale 7nm/5nm wafer output despite yield and tooling constraints. Research and safety/policy discuss optimizer gains from masked updates, “deep thinking tokens” as a reasoning-effort signal, LLM attractor-state behaviors in bot-to-bot chats, mechanistic interpretability of counting/line-wrapping, methods to map task difficulty to human time horizons, plus Anthropic–Pentagon contract tensions, Anthropic’s report on distillation attacks (DeepSeek/Moonshot/Minimax), and OpenAI’s report on disrupting malicious use. A thank you to our current sponsors: Box - visit Box.com/AI to learn more ODSC AI - go to odsc.ai/east and use promo code LWAI for an additional 15% off your pass to ODSC AI East 2026. Factor - head to factormeals.com/lwai50off and use code lwai50off to get 50 percent off and free breakfast for a year Timestamps: (00:00:10) Intro / Banter (00:01:52) News Preview Tools & Apps (00:03:20) Anthropic releases Sonnet 4.6 | TechCrunch (00:11:24) Google Rolls Out Latest AI Model, Gemini 3.1 Pro - CNET (00:14:54) Elon Musk says Grok 4.20 public beta is now available: Capabilities of AI chatbot offered by xAI - The Times of India (00:18:06) Anthropic just released a mobile version of Claude Code called Remote Control | VentureBeat (00:21:01) Perplexity announces “Computer,” an AI agent that assigns work to other AI agents - Ars Technica Applications & Business (00:23:40) Meta strikes up to $100B AMD chip deal as it chases ‘personal superintelligence’ | TechCrunch (00:27:05) Nvidia challenger AI chip startup MatX raised $500M | TechCrunch (00:31:00) World Labs lands $1B, with $200M from Autodesk, to bring world models into 3D workflows | TechCrunch (00:33:07) Simile Raises $100 Million for AI Aiming to Predict Human Behavior (00:33:52) Stargate AI data centers for OpenAI reportedly delayed by squabbles between partners — sources say OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank disagreed on who would have ultimate control of the planned data centers (00:36:43) China to increase leading-edge chip output by 5x in two years, report claims — aims to lift 7nm and 5nm production to 100,000 wafers per month, targeting half a million monthly by 2030 Research & Advancements (00:40:33) On Surprising Effectiveness of Masking Updates in Adaptive Optimizers (00:48:03) Think Deep, Not Just Long: Measuring LLM Reasoning Effort via Deep-Thinking Tokens (00:54:52) models have some pretty funny attractor states (01:01:41) When Models Manipulate Manifolds: The Geometry of a Counting Task (01:05:16) BRIDGE: Predicting Human Task Completion Time From Model Performance (01:12:00) NESSiE: The Necessary Safety Benchmark -- Identifying Errors that should not Exist (01:13:15) The least understood driver of AI progress (01:21:45) The Persona Selection Model: Why AI Assistants might Behave like Humans Policy & Safety (01:25:04) Anthropic CEO Amodei says Pentagon’s threats ‘do not change our position’ on AI (01:33:04) Musk’s xAI, Pentagon reach deal to use Grok in classified systems (01:34:17) Detecting and preventing distillation attacks (01:38:36) OpenAI details expanding efforts to disrupt malicious use of AI in new report - SiliconANGLE Discussion about this episode Comments Restacks Podcast Weekly AI summaries and discussion about Last Week's AI News! Subscribe over at https://www.lastweekinai.com/ Weekly AI summaries and discussion about Last Week's AI News! Subscribe over at https://www.lastweekinai.com/ Subscribe Authors Last Week in AI Recent Episodes LWiAI Podcast #237 - Nemotron 3 Super, xAI reborn, Anthropic Lawsuit, Research! Mar 16   •   Last Week in AI LWiAI Podcast #236 - GPT 5.4, Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite, Supply Chain Risk Mar 13   •   Last Week in AI LWiAI Podcast #234 - Opus 4.6, GPT-5.3-Codex, Seedance 2.0, GLM-5 Feb 17   •   Last Week in AI LWiAI Podcast #233 - Moltbot, Genie 3, Qwen3-Max-Thinking Feb 6   •   Last Week in AI LWiAI Podcast #232 - ChatGPT Ads, Thinking Machines Drama, STEM Jan 28   •   Last Week in AI LWiAI Podcast #231 - Claude Cowork, Anthropic $10B, Deep Delta Learning Jan 21   •   Last Week in AI LWiAI Podcast #230 - 2025 Retrospective, Nvidia buys Groq, GLM 4.7, METR Jan 7   •   Last Week in AI